€ = MC [ ]

QI is my new favorite TV show. Most of the shows that I have access to are these almost community access talent shows or, more commonly, tons of American syndicated shows. I have never seen so many Scrubs and King of Queens marathons in my life. So you can imagine why I would be thrilled to discover a show which is essentially a comedy discussion panel that covers trivia. It's hosted by the brilliant (both intellectually and comedically) Stephen Fry and has guests like Emma Thompson and Clive Anderson (yes, the host of Whose Line Is It Anyway?), as well as a ton of new favorite people of mine that I had never heard of before. I wish we had something like it in the US, but it would never be popular enough to last. I don't really have anything insightful to say about television or culture in relation to my new favorite show, but I will mention that you can watch clips of it on YouTube if you want to see what I'm talking about. It's good shit.

Now the other day I was weighing myself on an Irish scale, and there is nothing quite as discombobulating as seeing your weight in stones. For those who don't know (as I didn't before I asked) a stone is 14 pounds. So I stepped on this scale and freaked out, thinking that there was no gravity in Ireland or something. Once you get past that, it's pretty neat to see a working scale tell you that you weigh 1/14 of what you really do, like it's telling you your birth weight. But I feel bad that I still haven't wrapped my head around having an automatic computation of the different measurements here. I know that a kilo is 2.2 lbs, but I still have to stop and do the math when someone tells me a weight rather than having a quick general idea of what that converts to. Same with celsius and fahrenheit, and I always state that things here cost dollars instead of Euros (although I'm very aware of that conversion rate at all times). It's also sad because everything is metric over here, which makes more sense than anything we do in America, but of course the only time we ever use metric systems are in chemistry class. And I've given up trying to understand the nutritional data measurements on food out here. Oh well, I'll just come back to the US a few stones heavier.